“IT’S winter 2030. Work is going badly, your love life is in tatters. Feeling irritable and melancholic, you reach for your computer and call up Normopsych, an on-line drugs service specialising in personality restructuring.” Such was the vision of the future that opened a Â鶹´«Ă˝ feature entitled “Design your own personality” on 12 March 1994.
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A quarter of a century ago, the first graphical web browsers had only just been released, so we were ahead of the curve with our vision of the future “on-line”. But the real trigger for the article was a new class of drugs that had just hit the market. The antidepressant Prozac was causing a media stir, and other drugs that seemed to increase the amount of the happiness-linked chemical serotonin in the brain were in development.
This offered a taste of things to come, said psychiatrist Peter Kramer in the feature. His bestselling book Listening to Prozac had claimed that the drug not only improved mood, but could also transform personalities. According to the article’s strapline, popping a pill might soon “turn wallflowers into social butterflies and couch potatoes into go-getting executives”.
It seemed as if it were simply a matter of deducing which chemicals did what in the brain, and then “selecting compounds that can influence the workings of specific neurotransmitter pathways”. Many saw conditions like depression and anxiety as being on a spectrum of personality traits such as introversion and shyness.
We now know it isn’t that simple. The precise effect of neurotransmitters on mood has only become less clear, and we are still a long way from understanding exactly how drugs such as Prozac work. The conflation of personality traits and mental illness is very much of its time, too. Even the notion that mental illness is the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain is losing ground. Sometimes in science, the more we learn, the more our ignorance becomes apparent.
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